A federal judge has denied efforts to remove oversight of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, saying the agency continues to show racial disparities in traffic arrests of Latinos — and that there is not enough evidence that efforts to improve would stick without legal monitoring.

In his 72-page ruling issued Sept. 10, U.S. District Judge G. Murray Snow stressed Sheriff Jerry Sheridan’s role in the department’s racial profiling since the start of the case more than a decade ago, including fighting court-ordered reforms and stymieing investigations. Sheridan was the No. 2 under former Sheriff Joe Arpaio when the county was found out of compliance with federal law.

“Then Chief Deputy, now Sheriff, Sheridan in particular was found to have abused his authority over MCSO’s internal affairs process by obstructing and manipulating misconduct investigations and disciplinary proceedings — including those involving himself — to shield deputies and Command Staff from accountability and undermine the enforcement of remedies designed to address the constitutional violations against the Plaintiff class,” the judge wrote in an opinion that mentions Sheridan 30 times.

The department declined to comment on Snow’s statements about Sheridan. But the sheriff previously told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica that he disagreed with Snow. “I was very truthful. To this day, I think he got that wrong about me,” Sheridan said.

In his ruling, Snow said it may no longer be necessary for the court to track some areas originally identified for oversight in the 2013 decision, recognizing the “burdens” that go into monitoring certain elements. 

County leaders have repeatedly cited costs as they’ve called for an end of court oversight. Maricopa County filed the motion in December, with the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office later joining, arguing the violations were no longer occurring.

The yearslong federal monitorship of Arizona’s largest sheriff’s office dates back to a 2007 class action racial profiling lawsuit that found the department under Arpaio had violated the constitutional rights of Latinos in the state’s most populous county. Today, according to U.S. Census Bureau data, there are an estimated 1.5 million Latino or Hispanic people living in Maricopa County — all of whose rights are protected under the lawsuit.

In 2013, Snow ordered the department to document all traffic stops to detect any patterns of racial bias and to employ additional investigators to probe reports of deputy misconduct. Snow also appointed a monitor to oversee compliance with the settlement.

In the 13 years since, the department has yet to convince the judge that its deputies don’t racially profile Latino drivers and that it adequately investigates deputies’ alleged misconduct. In denying the recent motion, Snow cited data showing that sheriff’s deputies in Maricopa County continue to search and arrest Latino drivers at a higher rate than white drivers, echoing the racial disparities that first led to court oversight of the department.

“Those disparities remain,” Snow added.

A key part of the judge’s analysis results from traffic reports collected by the sheriff’s office. An analysis of those reports on behalf of the plaintiffs by a professor of computer science from the University of California, Berkeley approximates that Hispanic motorists are 40% more likely to be arrested than white motorists, are stopped 30% longer than white motorists and are 2.5 times more likely to be searched than white motorists. 

The responsibility is on the defendants to explain the stark disparities for Latino drivers, Snow said. “They have failed to do so.” To end court oversight, the sheriff’s office must be in full compliance with the reforms continuously for three years.

An investigation by Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica found that despite the monitor’s annual reviews showing ongoing racial disparities in traffic stops, Sheridan and county leaders continued to press for an end to court oversight. 

Arpaio’s wide-ranging, illegal traffic sweeps prompted the lawsuit, known originally as Melendres v. Arpaio, named for Manuel de Jesus Melendres Ortega, a legal resident who was arrested in such a sweep.

Under Arpaio, Maricopa County became an early testing ground for Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s 287(g) program, which lets local police enforce federal immigration laws. Many Arizonans say abuses from that time, including profiling of Latino motorists, foreshadowed what’s playing out now under the Trump administration’s expanded use of 287(g) and its mass deportation system.

The arrests of hundreds of American citizens by immigration authorities since President Donald Trump returned to the White House have prompted widespread accusations of racial profiling. In response, the Department of Homeland Security told ProPublica that agents do not racially profile or target Americans. “We don’t arrest US citizens for immigration enforcement,” wrote spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin.

The decade-plus of legal oversight of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department, criminal justice experts have said, offers insight into the difficulties of reforming law enforcement agencies charged with endemic racial bias.

Sheridan, a Republican, was found in civil contempt in 2016 for denying knowledge of Snow’s court order to stop making illegal immigration arrests. Sheridan has said he was always truthful. He inherited the settlement when he took office in January 2025. 

A 2025 evaluation by the monitor found the department complied with more than 90% of the requirements but fell short in the two areas that most directly impact Latino drivers: eliminating racial bias in traffic stops and quickly investigating allegations of deputy misconduct.

In trying to end federal oversight, Sheridan and county supervisors argued that racially biased Arpaio-era policies were no longer written department policy and there were few complaints of misconduct by deputies against Hispanic drivers.

“MCSO has reformed its policies, improved its workforce, and implemented mechanisms to assure that racial profiling never occurs. This litigation has been a success, and the time has come to allow MCSO to stand on its own two feet, freed of oversight,” the county’s original motion said.

Since joining the Melendres case and settlement in 2015, the U.S. Department of Justice had supported Snow’s federal oversight and the reforms. But with Trump back in the White House, an attorney with the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division informed the court in January that the department supported ending oversight.

Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chair Kate Brophy McGee and Vice Chair Debbie Lesko, both Republicans, as well as a spokesperson with Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, said they were disappointed by the judge’s ruling. Steve Gallardo, the county’s lone Democrat on the five-member board, has opposed ending oversight, advocating for continued progress toward eliminating racial bias in policing.

“The court has maintained an unelected and unaccountable federal monitor over MCSO – creating bureaucracy and regulatory burdens that have cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. That ‘oversight’ comes at the cost of public safety, as the county must pay the monitor and his staff by foregoing other critical services,” said a joint statement from McGee and Lesko. 

Following complaints by Sheridan and Republican county supervisors that oversight costs topped $200 million, the court ordered an audit of the sheriff’s office spending. Court findings, shared in 2025, showed that nearly 72% of the sheriff’s office spending was misattributed or misappropriated. Only $63 million was appropriately charged to the settlement, they said. 

Officials with the sheriff’s office, however, welcomed parts of the judge’s latest ruling.

“We believe MCSO has implemented durable remedies for violations that occurred 19 years and three administrations ago,” Sgt. Joaquin Enriquez said. “We are encouraged that the Court has provided a framework on eliminating portions of the Order that are no longer necessary and focusing compliance efforts on the remaining issues to be addressed.” 

Speaking to a Phoenix-area radio station, Sheridan said he saw positive elements of the judge’s order but wondered whether his office could ever satisfy all parties to the lawsuit.  

“We at the sheriff’s office feel we’re in compliance with all the” court’s orders, Sheridan told KTAR News. “But the court-appointed monitor does not believe so. It’s a matter of us making a pitch to the court directly, not through the monitor.” 

Notably, the judge’s ruling said, there was no evidence that the department would continue to remedy the violations should oversight to ensure Latinos’ constitutional rights end. 

“The record does not support a finding that, absent federal monitoring, Defendants are unlikely to resume the conduct that necessitated the Court’s injunctive Orders,” the ruling stated. 

Raul Piña, a member of a court-mandated community advisory board tasked with helping the sheriff’s office rebuild trust with Latinos, said the problems at the department went beyond one specific leader, to multiple systems that have allowed biased policing long-term. To change that, Piña said, you need a broader overhaul. “You can paint the house, but if the foundation is broken you will have the same problem,” he told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica. 

The American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, which originally filed the lawsuit on behalf of citizens and legal residents caught in Arpaio’s sweeps, celebrated the current ruling. 

“Any other decision would have had a devastating impact on Maricopa County’s Latino residents,” Christine Wee, senior staff attorney for the ACLU of Arizona, said in a statement. “The Court’s decision recognizes that any current and future misconduct committed by MCSO will not be tolerated. Simply put, MCSO is not ready for the court-ordered reforms to end.”

The post Judge Denies Efforts to End Oversight of Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office as Racial Profiling of Latinos Persists appeared first on ProPublica.

Four Democratic Tennessee state lawmakers sent a letter to the Department of Children’s Services demanding answers about safety and oversight in the state’s juvenile justice facilities.

The letter cites a recent WPLN and ProPublica investigation that found that juvenile justice facilities run by Tennessee businessman Jason Crews repeatedly failed to report abuse of children and other serious incidents to the state as required. The reporting involved interviews with dozens of former staff and youth, along with a review of emergency call logs, company records and state documents. Crews and his company Wayne Halfway House run all three of the state’s highest-security youth prisons. 

“The allegations that serious physical and sexual abuse, dangerous restraints, injuries, and other critical incidents have gone unreported by WHH demand an urgent, transparent, and independently verifiable response from the Department of Children’s Services,” lawmakers wrote. 

After WPLN and ProPublica sent a copy of the letter to the company, a spokesperson said that Wayne Halfway House “continues to meet or exceed performance standards set by Tennessee,” citing state audits. The spokesperson also said that Wayne Halfway House has helped more than 200 youth earn a high school diploma or equivalent in the last three years.

In emailed statements to WPLN and ProPublica about the previous reporting, the company said it follows state policy and law and “vehemently denies” that Crews or his company ever discouraged staff from reporting serious or life-threatening incidents to the state. It described former employees who spoke with us as “untrustworthy sources” with a “clear bias” against the company and called their allegations “substantially flawed.”

Lawmakers are asking for answers to several questions raised by this investigation, including what steps the department is taking to address the allegations, how much money the state spends to place youth in Wayne Halfway House facilities, and who is being considered to operate new juvenile facilities the department is building. 

“We also request an opportunity to meet with Department leadership to discuss these issues, review the Department’s response, and identify the legislative and administrative actions necessary to ensure that no child’s safety depends on abuse first becoming a news story,” lawmakers wrote.

In response to the news organizations’ initial investigation, DCS said it is looking into incidents that were uncovered by the reporting. DCS did not respond to a request for comment on the letter.

Lawmakers noted that the latest investigation joins a “long and deeply troubling record of reports” on juvenile justice facilities across the state. They referenced previous reporting from WPLN and ProPublica that found a county-run East Tennessee juvenile detention center was locking kids in solitary confinement in violation of state law. The department said it would take steps to address the findings from the 2023 investigation, and the superintendent of the facility, Richard Bean, later stepped down. 

State Sen. Heidi Campbell, who signed onto the letter, also pushed for independent oversight of juvenile justice facilities in 2024, after WPLN and ProPublica’s reporting from East Tennessee. Campbell and others working on that bill said a lobbyist for Wayne Halfway House asked them to exempt privately run facilities from oversight. The oversight bill eventually failed. A lobbyist for Wayne Halfway House told the news organizations at the time that the company was concerned about giving regulatory power to an outside agency “without more extensive consideration.”

Lawmakers are also worried about the state’s increased spending on juvenile justice, especially as Tennessee plans to spend more than $400 million to build more facilities. The cost to hold 31 youth at a Wayne Halfway House facility for a year is roughly the same amount it would take the state to expand grocery benefits for 700,000 school-aged children during the summer, lawmakers wrote. 

“Given the amount of money Tennessee is currently spending, and plans to invest, in juvenile justice and residential facilities, we have serious concerns about repeated findings and allegations of lack of oversight, transparency, and accountability in these facilities,” lawmakers wrote.

The post Tennessee Lawmakers Demand Answers on Safety in State Youth Prisons appeared first on ProPublica.

Landmark legislation designed to alert consumers to where their drugs were made is headed for a full Senate vote, but safety experts say the transparency bill has been stripped of two of its most critical provisions.

The Clear Labels Act was introduced earlier this year by Sens. Rick Scott, R-Fla., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., after lawmakers and drug safety experts called for more transparency in the industry. Last year, a ProPublica investigation revealed that the U.S. kept importing generic drugs from foreign factories after inspectors had identified quality and safety lapses at the sites, including leaks, mold and contaminated water.

Medications made at these facilities were linked to thousands of reported adverse reactions in patients.

The bill aims to allow doctors and patients to see on the label exactly where a medication was made — details that had largely been withheld until now, even from Congress. Current generic drug labels often include only the location of the packager or distributor, which can be thousands of miles away from the actual manufacturer. 

One provision made the law particularly strong, experts said: The label was supposed to include a unique code that the Food and Drug Administration uses to identify factories. That code would have made it easier for researchers and the public to track the regulatory histories of specific facilities. 

The requirements also were supposed to take effect as early as a year after the bill’s passage.

Senators have now struck both of those provisions. People familiar with the deliberations said lawmakers worried the requirements would raise drug prices and weaken national security by revealing the precise locations where lifesaving medications are made. 

The unique identifier requirement has been removed from the bill, and the timeline for companies to come into compliance was extended to five years.

“It’s just a clear watering down of the original bill,” said retired Army Col. Vic Suarez, a former medical supply-chain commander who has been leading a push for more domestic pharmaceutical manufacturing. 

He and others also questioned why drug companies need multiple years to comply.

“Five years after it passes might as well be a lifetime,” said Dr. Kevin Schulman, a professor of medicine and health policy at Stanford University who has researched the economic pressures that lead to poor-quality generic drugs. “Why is it that the supply chain, the medical distributors and the retailers don’t want to make sure that they supply the highest-quality product?”

In a joint press release, Scott and Gillibrand praised the bill’s progress in the Senate, calling it a “massive win for consumer safety and transparency,” but did not address the changes.

A representative from Gillibrand’s office said the five-year delay is meant to give the FDA time for rulemaking, which is a complicated, often yearslong process used to introduce new regulations. The delay would also give manufacturers time to come into compliance and redesign their labels, the representative said.

But Peter Baker, a former FDA inspector whose work involved the very companies impacted by the bill, said that amount of time is unnecessary. 

“If they wanted to do it in one year, they could,” Baker said. “I would love to hear their justification on why they need five years to develop some rules and guidance on transparency. … I mean, it’s a simple label change.”

The new version of the legislation also removes the key requirement to include a unique facility identification number on labels, called a DUNS number, which would have allowed the public to more easily trace a generic drug and its active ingredients to the factories where they were made. In some cases, that identifier could also be used to find FDA inspection reports that describe contamination and other safety breakdowns on factory floors.

ProPublica used that ID number to collect data for Rx Inspector, a first-of-its-kind tool that allows consumers and doctors to look up where more than 40,000 generic drugs are made. Pharmacists and patients are already using the tool to learn more about the drugs they take and prescribe.

Under the bill’s updated language, drug labels will only be required to include factory addresses, which can be inconsistent and hard to trace to a manufacturing facility. A single address in India, for example, can house multiple factories, each producing its own drugs, or each with a slight variation on the same address. 

ProPublica reporters ran into this issue when collecting data for the Rx Inspector tool. In 69% of prescription drug labels, reporters found a generic drug manufacturer’s DUNS number and were able to directly connect it to a specific facility. However, when only a manufacturer’s address was available, linking a drug to a particular facility became much harder, requiring a complicated process of automated address verification, geolocation and extensive manual review.

Experts also worried about certain language in the legislation that could allow manufacturers to avoid identifying where their factories are at all. Representatives for the bill’s sponsors have said that manufacturers are required to identify the factory where drugs were made, but the legislation only mentions a “place of business.” Drugmakers could potentially list the address for their headquarters or a subsidiary location in the United States rather than a factory overseas.

“If, in fact, ‘place of business’ can be interpreted as the location of the importer or the headquarters or something like that, it would be no different than what we have today,” said Ohio State University professor John Gray, who testified before the Senate Special Committee on Aging, led by Scott and Gillibrand.

“Then we’ll be right back to where we are,” Gray said. “It’ll say ‘Manufactured for So-and-So in New York City,’ but it’s actually made somewhere else around the world.”

People familiar with negotiations over the bill’s language said they are confident that manufacturers won’t have a loophole. The changes to the bill were primarily made as a compromise between committee offices and stakeholders, they said, and the FDA will have final say in what counts as an acceptable address.

The Association for Accessible Medicines, the generic drug lobbying group, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. A spokesperson for the association previously spoke out against the bill to ProPublica, saying the additional requirements would cause “significant costs in exchange for limited return.”

The lobbying group spent over $1 million between January and July on healthcare and generics-related bills, including the Clear Labels Act, according to its public filings. 

The trade group for brand-name manufacturers did not respond to a request for comment. Previously, a spokesperson for the brand-name trade group said the industry would “welcome conversations about how to strengthen the biopharmaceutical supply chain.” 

The bill faced pushback from some lawmakers on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H, raised the national security concerns, and Sen. Rand Paul, R-K.Y., said he worried about creating an additional hurdle to drug production.

Ultimately, the revised bill passed the committee in July, with only Paul dissenting. The full Senate is set to take up the measure; a date has not yet been scheduled.

Congress will work with the FDA to make sure the law is properly interpreted and enforced, according to those familiar with the negotiations.

Baker said the burden of ensuring compliance will fall to already-overworked inspectors, who will be forced to determine whether manufacturers are skirting the address requirement. It would be easier to require the unique identifier, he said, because inspectors could more easily verify the information.

“The more flexibility they allow, the more complex it is to enforce it,” Baker said.

Baker also pushed back against concerns about a potential national security threat. He said data about where U.S. drugs come from is already well known, so including factory information on labels wouldn’t pose a significant risk.

“It’s a public health concern over a national security concern,” he said. “I would say that those risks outweigh the national security concerns.”

The post “A Clear Watering Down”: Drug Transparency Bill Stripped of Critical Provisions Ahead of Senate Vote appeared first on ProPublica.

If you have seen the headlines of the major investigation we recently published, “The Dominican Baseball Factory,” you may have wondered: Why is ProPublica, with its serious-sounding mission of accountability and its focus on abuses of power, reporting on baseball?

The answer would be: Exactly.

Baseball fans have long marveled at how the Dominican Republic, a tiny island nation with a population akin to Ohio, has produced so many brilliant players — roughly 10% of the major league. Major League Baseball and the owners of its 30 teams have regularly harvested bumper crops of sluggers to build their rosters and their fanbase, including most recently the Toronto Blue Jays’ Vladimir Guerrero Jr., the New York Mets’ Juan Soto and the San Diego Padres’ Fernando Tatis Jr., whose playing contracts total more than $1.6 billion.  

But as with many such tales of extraordinary success, the origin story is much darker. 

When we hired reporter Gus Garcia-Roberts from The Washington Post as our first reporter dedicated to sports, he arrived with an idea: He’d long heard that the Dominican Republic system that had churned out so many stars was deeply problematic. Garcia-Roberts wanted to dig into that world, not just to explain how it operated but to identify the individuals who were taking advantage of the young players and those who were allowing it to happen. What if he was afforded the time to track a promising young player — a potential superstar — as he was plucked from obscurity by a major league team?

Even prepped, Garcia-Roberts was surprised by what he found: For generations, poor parents in the Dominican Republic have shunted their children into an unforgiving juggernaut of baseball academies praying for a chance at a life-altering signing bonus from an MLB team. Since the bonus could not be delivered until age 16, teams had begun locking up talent younger and younger with verbal IOUs. As for the kids who don’t make the cut, well, they paid with their childhoods, and sometimes with their health.

Garcia-Roberts also detailed the rapacious industry that had sprung up around these young players and their parents: Trainers and moneylenders, he found, were siphoning away those signing bonuses with predatory, high-interest loans and other, often questionable, claims before they even arrived.

Significantly, Garcia-Roberts found, MLB itself has long known about the often brutal world surrounding its youngest prospects. The players union has as well; Dominican players, led by former Boston Red Sox star David “Big Papi” Ortiz, have argued against efforts to establish an international draft — a move that would end early bonuses, cutting off a revenue stream for moneylenders. Ortiz told players, according to an audio message, that an international draft would be “trouble” for people in the Dominican Republic. In a statement sent through his lawyer, Ortiz told Garcia-Roberts that his opposition to the proposal “was never motivated by personal interests.” 

There’s big money in sports, and with it lots of reasons to explore how it is being wielded and who is paying the cost. And that is why ProPublica is diving in.

These days, you’d be hard-pressed to find a slice of society untouched by the Big Money tentacles of the sports industry — and the lack of accountability that often goes along with them. Got a gleaming new stadium in town? Your tax dollars likely paid for much or all of it, despite its billionaire owners (while you may not be able to afford a ticket — unless it’s to a Mets game). Got a kid in youth sports? You may have experienced the boggling cost of travel teams or noted that private equity is buying up leagues and tournaments. Watch sports on TV? The ads for online gambling can seem as ubiquitous as the score, luring legions into a new scourge of addiction. And the Los Angeles Lakers just sold for $12.5 billion! With a B, amid, of course, a scandal about how the previous owner financed his purchase.

All of that big money is ramping up just as the landscape of sports journalism has contracted along with the larger media industry.

What ProPublica brings to sports is the time, the skill set and the resources to go beyond the games and the individual stories. Our approach to investigative reporting required Garcia-Roberts to get inside the system, to find out how it works and who is being harmed, and then reveal who is responsible and who is preventing the problems from being fixed. 

Without the expectation to cover games or daily sports news, reporters like Garcia-Roberts won’t be hamstrung by what one of my colleagues called “the conundrum of access.” You dig out the unsightly bits and suddenly your sources dry up and with them your scoops. And we haven’t covered a topic so long that we have become blind to its flaws. 

This isn’t ProPublica’s first dive into sports investigations. In 2021, reporters Robert Faturechi, Justin Elliott and Ellis Simani were scrutinizing a trove of federal tax data and noticed that the billionaire owners of the nation’s sports teams were taking fat write-offs on team assets, from media deals to player contracts. 

In 2015, former ProPublica reporter David Epstein wrote about how one of the most powerful track coaches in the world was accused of experimenting with testosterone and pressuring athletes to use prescription medications they didn’t need to gain a performance benefit. The story touched off an investigation by the United States Anti-Doping Agency that eventually led to the coach’s four-year ban. And most recently, Molly Hensley-Clancy, in partnership with The Washington Post, published an investigation that found a youth sports giant failed to put in place promised reforms to prevent child abuse. 

You can expect to see more of ProPublica’s reporting on sports in coming months, and like the box scores, they will be spelling out who is winning and who is losing. That’ll just likely mean something different to us. If you’d like to read those stories, we’d love to send our Big Story newsletter right to your inbox. In the meantime, if you have a story tip for a terrific sports investigation, or just something sports-related you think we should know, we’d love to hear it. Please get in touch with reporter Gus Garcia-Roberts or contact ProPublica via any of these secure methods.

The post Why ProPublica Is Leaning Into Sports Investigations appeared first on ProPublica.